That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Screen Time Addiction

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

For many of us, it's hard to go a day without being on our phones. This can come in the form of urges to pick up your phone when you're not doing anything, or even shutting out the rest of your environment when you're on your phone. But why are we so addicted to our screens, and how does that affect our brains? In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind smartphone and screen addictions. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Craig Olson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So we've all dealt with this, and we've seen people dealing with it. dealt with this and we've seen people dealing with it. You know, a recent survey summed it up pretty well, which is that over 90% of people that were surveyed said they were troubled when they didn't have their phone with them. And there was some other interesting stuff there. 80% of the people that responded said they actually felt jealous when someone else was holding their phone. And 70% said they were expected that they'd be depressed or panicked or helpless if their phone was lost or stolen. And we've seen that behavior, right? Always checking your phone, always checking your phone, unable to put their phone down. You know, some people even check it throughout the night. They

wake up to check it. And it's been shown that since we've had more and more cell phones, people feel more anxious about these things. So on today's podcast, the neuroscience about why we're addicted to our phones. Now, the reality is we've talked about all these bits and pieces. So I just wanted to throw it together with this specific topic because you know, I tell my undergraduate students sometimes if you're on a date and you look across the table and you're both on your phones, you're probably dating the wrong person. you're probably dating the wrong person. And, you know, I recently went on a trip with a friend of mine who literally spent over 12 hours a day on his phone, checking his phone, if not longer. So I think it's a crucial topic. And there was a phase in my life, I'll admit, where I was addicted

to my phone. Now, you know, when I go to my bedroom at night, it stays on the kitchen counter and I don't check it for any reason. But why? How does this happen? What's going on? Well, if you think back to season one and some of the other things we've talked about, it comes down to dopamine. All right, at least that's where it starts. So what is dopamine actually doing? Well, generally, when you see something or something happens that you enjoy, right? So you see a like on Facebook, which we talked about way back at the beginning of season one, or you see an email from a friend, something like this, you get this little release of dopamine. And what that dopamine is doing in this initial stage is reinforcing the

behavior. It basically is the reward. You feel a bit happier. And next thing you know, you want to do it again. Dopamine levels drop a little bit. So what do you do? You pick up your phone because for a lot of us, it's our contact point with the world, right? You know, whether it's work, email, social media, or the news, you know, TikTok videos, you name it. These little things lead to these brief increases of dopamine. So we end up feeling happy as a result. And then guess what? We end up picking up our phone again when we want these little hits of dopamine. So dopamine is building that behavior, all right? It's building

the association between happiness and picking up your phone. Now, you might say to yourself, sometimes I pick up my phone and I'm not happy with what I see. I posted a cool picture on Instagram and no one's liked it, right? Or I was expecting someone to call. I can see that they had the read receipt, but they still haven't answered me. Well, it's an addiction at this point. So dopamine has caused this addiction where you keep doing this thing over and over again because you believe it's the path to happiness. And this is a habit, right? So we talked about habit formation. Basically, what's happening then is you've got this more permanent pathway,

and you keep going back to it because you believe it's the path to being happy. And that's the negative side to it, right? You believe that your phone is the crucial thing that's going to lead to that dopamine release. And so even if it's, even if that little bit of happy isn't there, you still end up checking it in any event. Now, of course it's a communication device, right? And, and we, we see it as a world, a way to communicate with the world. Um, and it is, it's something you can carry around so anyone can get a hold of you at any time. All right. But what's the, you know, the reason for that we talked about a bit before is that humans are social animals, right? So we have this dependency that's pretty

hardwired where we want to communicate with the outside world. All right. We want to communicate with loved ones or significant others. And that stems back to, you know, the evolution of man. You know, we had to be worked together to survive. That's the reality of it. When humans evolved, they were in a very harsh circumstance, and it was tough to survive. And social connections and social interactions basically meant you had a higher chance of surviving. So because of that, we are sort of hardwired with this deep-seated desire to be social animals. And guess what? That is what our phone allows us to do.

At least we believe it does. It allows us, we believe it allows us to be social when potentially we're in a situation where we can't be social. All right. It's something that leads to the human connection. So the read receipts thing I think is kind of cheeky because, you know, you see that someone's read it, but they're not responding, right? They're not responding at all. And that upsets you because you want that interaction. That social connection is not there. I find this one interesting because I'm old enough that I grew up in an era where we didn't have cell phones. But, you know, if you were out, you were just out. And people seem to have lost their ability to accept that

because what cell phones have done in this instant communication is they've really put this human connection issue, this deep, hardwired social thing to a forefront where we believe we need to have that connection and it needs to be instantaneous. And this is a good challenge. Any number of people that talk about positive mental health, I've done it on the podcast a lot of times, but when I give this

talk on positive mental health, all of you can predict what I'd say, right? Exercise more, get your sleep, eat healthy. I even talk about social interaction, but there's also something I'm really into these days, hence this particular episode, which is digital mental health. Put down the phone, right? Walk, try it 24 hours without a cell phone or communication. You probably feel a bit anxious at the start, and that's because the social connection's not there, the dopamine's not there, but you probably will end up feeling better at the end of that time. And when you think back to what I was saying about social connection,

one of the other things I like to say when I do public talks on this sort of stuff is you have to remember the human brain didn't evolve for cell phones and cities. It evolved for a far different world. And our brain is still adapting, right? It's still trying to adapt to it. So this need for a social connection for the vast majority of people and this dopamine reinforcing behaviors is because that's how we learned up to survive. Now, I sort of hinted this already, but how do you stop the addiction to cell phones in this case? Well, the reality is you have to build counter habits, right? And we talked about this on the episode on habits. So as opposed to reaching for your phone, what else could you do? All right. One that I really

like to promote is meaningful conversation. Like if you're going to be face to face with someone, make that person the forefront, right? And put your phone away and just make a promise to yourself that you are going to interact with that person and you don't need to check your phone. Now there's some times and people always like to come up with these arguments. I used to do it with my son where I was like, oh gosh, I need to check to make sure

it's not my son. And that's a fair thing as a parent. And some people, you know, I've got medical colleagues where they're on call and if the phone rings, they need to answer. But as much as you can engage in meaningful conversation and try to change the habit. Don't make the phone the thing you need to communicate with. Make other people the thing you need to communicate with. And then the other thing we mentioned on the habit formation thing is, and like I said earlier, is just figure out something else to do. And I mentioned that earlier in this episode. Like what can you do as opposed to checking your phone?

All right. So that's a bit on why we're addicted to our cell phones. Like I said at the outset, it's basically a combination of things we've talked about. So in some sense, I hope you could have guessed all that. So the reality is part of the addiction to our phones is the same reason we're addicted to social media. the addiction to our phones is the same reason we're addicted to social media. It's this dopamine reward that happens that reinforces the behavior of checking your phone. But the other piece that it's true for social interaction, but the phone has other ways to do it other than social media,

is this idea of social interaction with other people, right? So the phone promotes something that you can do, all right, to communicate with people. And like I said, this is something that's been hardwired through human evolution because the reality is social interaction helps us survive. Anyway, that's a bit on why you're addicted to your phones. Probably the big announcement is Matt and I have decided to change up our season schedule a bit here in Canada. The way universities work is we basically are active in classes and teaching from September to the end of November.

And then December is exams and things. and then December as exams and things. And then we again go from January to March and April as exams and a bit of time off. And then we go again from May to the end of July with August being a bit of time off. So what we've decided to do to make the podcast manageable, because as I've said a few times, it is just literally me and Matt,

and we both have lives and I'm a professor and he's trying to finish his PhD. So what we've decided to do is reset the schedule. So we're going to be off now until the beginning of September. We'll be back after Labor Day here in Canada. And then what we're going to do is do our seasons. So we'll do the next season, season six from September to the end of November. And then we're going to take December off. We might go a weekend, but we'll take a lot of December off.

And then we'll come back in January, go to the end of March, probably go a weekend April, but take a couple of weeks off. And then in the summer, we'll go May, June and July. And then August as some time off. So our seasons are not going to be, I sort of started, when I started the podcast with Matt, we thought 21 episodes, that's varied a bit. I think we're only on episode 12 for season five, but we're going to stop here to realign the podcast with the way our academic lives work at the University of Victoria. Sorry if that's a bit selfish, but the podcast isn't

sustainable unless we do that, I don't believe. On a happier note, we officially broke 500,000 downloads this week. Thank you so, so, so much. I told Matt and we were just sort of sitting there in shock and we couldn't believe it. So thank you for everyone that listens. Please subscribe. As we get ready and start planning out season six we have a lot of stuff that we were going to do in season five but remember you can follow me on x at that neuroscience guy i am setting up something on threads as well and of course you can email us that neuroscience guy at gmail.com but the direct messaging seems to work a bit better

we both forget to check the gmail address of course there's patreon thank you for those people that have supported us a dollar a week five dollars a month whatever you think every bit helps and i got gave matt a check not long ago for the amount that was in the account and he was quite happy to get it helping him get through grad school. None of the money goes to me. And of course, there's our Etsy store. We haven't really added anything new for a while. And one of the reasons we want some downtime between seasons is to take care of business and those kinds of things.

Anyway, that's a lot of updates and a bit of a ramble. So we're off now until the beginning of September. We'll see you then. Thanks again for listening. That half million thing blew my mind. I won't lie. So my name's Oliver Kregolson. I'm that neuroscience guy.

And I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast.